So the Dutch Finance Minister – Gerrit Zalm – has a weblog. Not understanding too much Dutch it’s hard to make a very thorough assesment, although it does look rather austere. However, unlike Howard Dean and Wes Clark, it does appear that he is posting himself. But it is not for the fact that he has a weblog that Finance Minister Zalm is making headlines at the moment. Rather it is for some of his statements on the French government and the stability pact. According to Frans he announced last week “that he gave up trying to get the European Commission to act against France’s repeated breaching of the rules”. Now Frans understandably is scratching his head trying to determine what this might mean.
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Tag Archives: european
The importance of economic integration (and some investment advice)
In the comments to one of the posts below, I raised the point that America’s prosperity owes a great deal more to its economic integration rather than to any particular shared value system, and that this was part of logic behind the founding of the EU. I want to demonstrate exactly how important a point that can be by using my own line of work as an example.
I work for a medium-sized Belgian translation firm. We have a handful of full-time staff and some 200 freelance translators who take work from us. Our freelancers can and do take work from other sources, what we do is mostly dealing with clients. Like all good middlemen, we make it possible for businesses to negotiate a single price for their translation work and we act as an insurance policy. Avoiding the middleman may sometimes cost less, but if your freelance translator is sick or busy and you have a deadline to deal with, you have to scramble to find a substitute. If you deal with us, we have many translators on tap and someone will always take your work. Few firms – only a few very large ones – still keep in-house translators. Translators generally agree to charge us less than they would charge clients directly because we can bring them a great deal of work, and we take away the cost of billing and accounting. We charge customers a bit more because we simplify billing and guarantee schedules. This is pretty much how modern translation firms operate.
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Europe hors l’Europe
Since I’m on the subject of things extra-European today, I note that Le Monde is reporting that there will be a referendum in Guadéloupe and Martinique in December over changing the status and government structure of France’s Caribbean colonies. France has a tradition of being a very centralised state, but the last 20 years or so have seen the end of the old regime. Powers are now devolved to regional governments, and the DOM-TOM’s are increasingly autonomous. Corsica’s little set-back recently is, I suspect, just a speedbump in the decline of the centralised French state.
What I would like to propose is the idea that maybe there needs to be some debate on the status of Europe’s extra-European areas as whole.
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From Gunboat Diplomacy to Compassion?
The sinking of a boatload of Somali immigrants off the island of Lampedusa seems to have set off something akin to a feeling of collective remorse in Italy. (Would that the human tragedy that is occuring on a regular basis just off the straits of Gibraltar could provoke a similar reaction here in Spain!) Indeed Belusconi (always the master of great theatre) appears to have had them near to tears over in Strasbourg.
Irony apart, even his old ‘enemy’ – the good-soldier schultz – is quoted as saying he has “the impression that what Mr Berlusconi said came from the heart”. He could not however resist a reference to remarks which were last year attributed to Italian Reforms Minister Umberto Bossi to the effect that he wished the navy would open fire on ships carrying illegal migrants. Schulz is quoted as saying: “We are very happy that it is not those members of your government who want these boats sunk who are responsible for this issue in the (EU) home affairs council.”
Well this is the second time this month I find myself asking whether Berlusconi is having a change of heart. Since I try not to engage in type M speculation, I don’t need to answer this. What we might note is the way Interior Minister Pisanu is making the direct link with Italy’s ageing population and (hence) pension difficulties. After the Greeks tried to raise the question in Thessalonika, we could ask ourselves whether the South of Europe (where the demographic collapse is most profound, and immigrants are traditionally less in evidence) is about to adopt a collectively different approach on this question.
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Immigration: Europe’s Difficult and Perplexing Road to Reform
The Economist has a couple of useful pieces this week ( here and here ) comparing the politics of immigration in the US and the UK. Meantime US economist Richard Freeman has an NBER paper where he argues we should “Stop spending so much time thinking about the WTO. Technology transfer, international migration, and financial crises have orders of magnitude more important impacts on human welfare and the state of the economy”. In other words globalisation is not after all so much about trade as about labour migration and capital movements. And just how is Europe shaping up to the challenge? Well, by all accounts, not very well. But a surprising proposal has just surfaced from a very unexpected quarter. Immigrants in Italy may (eventually) get the right to vote. Even if this is a very limited proposal, it is certainly a positive one. I am just very surprised by its source.
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German Is Getting Sexy Again. Again.
The controverse reaction to Edward’s use of a French block quote in a blog that claims to be the place for intelligent English language coverage of European affairs, made me remember my first blogging conversation. It was a discussion about Germans not publishing in English and the stipulation by the Norwegian blogger Bj?rn St?rk that ??nothing beautiful or sensible should ever be written in Norwegian, if it could be written in English.? So after speaking French all evening, and in light of the above mentioned comments as well as my imminent visit to the Frankfurt International Book Fair (link in English) I felt compelled to recycle my defence of linguistic diversity as a virtue of its own right, which was first published in a slightly different version in almost a diary on February 2nd, 2003.
Bj?rn St?rk had a look around the web and was astonished by the fact that he could find relatively few European, particularly German and French, (particularly political) blogs published in English. Contemplating the deeper issue at hand – the relation of national cultures and supra-national languages – in this case English – in an age of global interaction – Bj?rn made an interesting argument concerning cultural imperialism, linguistic protectionism, linguistic economies of scale and scope as well as the advantages of publishing in English instead of one?s native language.
No doubt about it – English has become some sort lingua franca in many respects.
Shoes, Other Feet, Fits
EU unilaterally blocking Russia’s entry into the very very multilateral WTO.
How many poles is this multipolar thing going to have, anyway?
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Putin Doesn’t Like EU Terms for Entry
October 9, 2003
By Natalya Shurmina
YEKATERINBURG, Russia (Reuters) – President Vladimir Putin sharply
criticized European Union “bureaucrats” on Thursday for pressing the
country to raise domestic energy prices as a condition for joining the
World Trade Organization.
“We cannot move to world energy prices in a single day. It will ruin the
country’s economy. Eurobureaucrats either do not understand this or are
trying to impose conditions which are unacceptable for Russia’s entry to
WTO,” Putin told a Russian-German summit meeting in the Urals.
“Such a tough position toward Russia is unjustified and dishonest. We view
this as an attempt at arm-twisting.”
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Comment allez-vous?
From John Vinocur in the commentary pages of the Hairy Trib:
“At its most hurtful and remarkable, and yet perhaps its most honest, there is the start of acceptance by segments of the French intellectual community that French leadership, as it is constituted now, is not something Europe wants – or France merits.” …
“Of all the [current self-critical] books, the current No. 2 on the bestseller list of L’Express, ‘La France Qui Tombe,’ by Nicolas Baverez, has been the focus of unusual attention.
“Baverez, a practicing attorney and economist who has a strong place in the Paris establishment, argues that France’s leadership hates change. Rather, it ‘cultivates the status quo and rigidity’ because it is run through the connivance of politicians, civil servants and union officials, bringing together both the left- and right-wing elites. They are described as mainly concerned with preserving the failed statist system that protects their jobs and status.
“Although he has little patience with the American role in the world (it is branded unilateral, imperial and unpredictable, yet flexible and open to change) Baverez charges that the failure of French policy on Iraq and Europe – resisting the United States with nothing to offer in exchange, and attempting to force the rest of Europe to follow its lead – ‘crowns the process of the nation’s decline’ and leaves France in growing diplomatic isolation everywhere.
“Over the past year, said Bavarez, ‘French diplomacy has undertaken to broaden the fracture within the West, and duplicate American unilateralism on the European scale by its arrogant dressing down of Europe’s new democracies. It has sustained a systematically critical attitude that flees concrete propositions in favor of theoretical slogans exalting a multipolar world or multilateralism.’
“As for Europe, Bavarez maintains that France has been discredited by its reticence to transfer any kind of meaningful sovereignty to the central organization, its resistance to giving up its advantages in the area of agricultural policy and its disregard for the directives and rules of the European Union executive commission.
“He does not stop there. Of a united Europe, Bavarez said, France has ‘ruined what might have remained of a common foreign and security policy, deeply dividing the community and placing France in the minority.’ His country was at the edge of marginalization in Europe and the world, he claimed, because of its ‘verbal pretense of having real power’ that is ‘completely cut off from its capacity for influence or action.'” …
Ouch.
“Now, in response to the Bavarez book, there is public rage from the Chirac camp, which the Bavarez book charges with having neither the courage nor the competence to confront the basic problems.
“But the density of Bavarez’s factual argumentation, bolstered by the presence of the other books, all treating France’s pride-of-rank and French conceits with brutal disrespect, have given the notion of French decline a legitimacy, reality and currency that it lacked before in public debate.” …
“Daniel Vernet, a former senior editor of [Le Monde], wrote, ‘We often irritate our partners because too frequently we have the tendency to want to impose our views, or only to consider as truly European those positions that conform to a French vision, however much in the EU minority it may be.'” …
“The sum of the messages of the books, in French to the French, is that this vision of the country’s current circumstances is not a French-bashing invention from afar, but a home truth.
“For Bavarez, France is threatened with becoming a museum diplomatically and a transit center economically. To do anything about it, it must revive itself internally first, getting away from what he calls its ‘social statist model.’ To advance, it must end the dominant role of a ‘public sector placed outside of any constraint requiring productivity or competitiveness.’
“The reform of the rest of French policy, based on genuine integration into Europe, should follow, he argues.”
Pens?es?
He Who Pays the Piper
My Bulgarian ‘assistant’ still won’t let me forget Chirac’s last faux pas: that the biggest favour the candidate countries could do for themselves was to stay quiet. It looks like we’re going down the same road one more time. I really don’t think it is possible to effectively ‘buy’ opinions. I mean in the short term it may work as a tactic, but long term this will lead to more, not less, resentment and tension. I already feel that the Swedish euro vote was more a political statement than an economic one. The Netherlands are getting louder and louder in their denunciation of stability pact ‘flexibility’, and now the aid-recipients are effectively being told to put up and shut up. This is not a very auspicious start for a new constitution, nor does it offer a very encouraging insight into how it might work.
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Thank God for government by our betters
Via Crooked Timber and Mark Kleinman, I’ve just read this utterly stupid column from Forbes:
The EU is built on a fantasy–that men and women can do less and less work, have longer and longer holidays and retire at an earlier age, while having their income, in real terms, and their standard of living increase. And this miracle is to be brought about by the enlightened bureaucratic regulation of every aspect of life.
The EU is a French concept and is still largely run according to French ideas. And France is the archetypal EU country. If you have a regular job in France, your life is, in theory, lyrical. You work 35 hours a week. You generally get four weeks of holiday in August, plus a further three weeks throughout the year, in addition to 11 state holidays. Full medical care is provided, even in retirement. Retirement age varies, but it is now typically 55. Pensions may be two-thirds to three-quarters of a person’s salary at the time of retirement. […]
Americans should count their blessings, above all the supreme blessing of having an economy that is run by businessmen not bureaucrats, or that–under wise governance–runs itself.